You know the old story about how someone invented a light bulb that would work forever and never need replacing? Good for people, yes indeed, not so good for light bulb companies – people would only need to fit out their house with light bulbs once, then no more sales. So the companies got together and put a stop to it. True? I don’t know, but there have been a lot of stories of a similar kind over the years, and they do reflect reality. Corporations are not there to serve the interests of the public but to make ever greater profits – fair enough except when there are more important things at stake.

Was reminded of this by the recent Four Corners and earlier stories on the “resistance to wind farms” action groups. To understand the context for these groups remember the light bulb. Energy companies are in the business of selling, at huge and growing profits, fossil fuels, and energy produced by fossil fuels. You need to keep endlessly digging the stuff up, and burning it, making huge sums of money along the way. Imagine your horror if you discovered not just a new light bulb but a way of getting energy that didn’t involve doing this, that once built just kept providing energy cleanly, cheaply, and endlessly from wind turbines, solar panels, geothermal wells, tidal turbines. Goodbye huge profits from coal and oil, goodbye, eventually, old style energy companies (except those who could convince you that nuclear was the way to go – dig it up, process it, use it, profits all the way).

So there has been a constant campaign over the last decade or so, run directly or indirectly (through “think tanks” and “interest groups”) by people with an interest in keeping the gravy (sorry coal) trains running. They have told endless lies about the planet not warming and the cause and effects of that warming (yes indeed, CO2 from the burning of those fossil fuels); have running a concerted campaign to ensure that any scheme – price on carbon or ETS – which might have them paying for pollution would be defeated politically; and are now running a particularly cynical campaign to try to convince people that wind turbines harm your health. Success with that one will lead to a campaign, no doubt, to demonstrate how solar panels are bad for you – they are probably already getting people together to run that one.

A moment’s thought would tell you that the claims about health (this followed the earlier less successful one about how many millions of birds were killed by turbines – not many people swallowed that one, hence the new campaign) are nonsense. But the movers behind all this have cynically set about exploiting the natural fears people have for new developments, and the more scared people get the more “health effects” they will think they experience. Proper health studies show that there is no effect, and it would be good if those without a vested interest in killing renewable energy projects might help explain this to those who have been made concerned.

Climate change is gathering pace, and we need every renewable energy source thrown into the equation. Doesn’t need a light bulb going off in your head to see that.

Don’t let these energy companies sell the planet down the river in the name of profit. Stand up to them and don’t let them scare you with their fake campaigns.